What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

Abstract

The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first called educational entrepreneurship as a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.

Champions of democracy or agents of professionalization? The extension era at the universities of Toronto, Queen's, and McMaster

“…While sociologists have documented the contemporary role of university education in social closure, the historical role of Canadian universities in processes of professionalization has not been adequately explained. Collins (1977, 1979) linked educational credentials and social closure in the USA and elsewhere, and there has been some work linking the history of Canadian universities with social change (Davies & Aurini, 2021), but there has been little sociological work examining the history of the construction of post‐secondary credentials in Canada (for an American study, see Kindel & Stevens, 2021). Why and how Canadian universities contributed to “professional projects” (Witz, 1992) remains an important gap in the literature.…”

Digitalisation as Distinction? Identity Articulation and Tacit Competition in the Swiss University Field, 2010–2020

“…Digitalisation is strongly marked by entrepreneurial activities by members of higher education, expanding the activities of universities (cf. Kindel and Stevens 2021).…”